Nvidia GeForce GTS 450 Review

Nvidia's graphics-card rival, AMD/ATI, had a huge head start in the latest round of the gaming-card wars, announcing its first cards equipped with support for DirectX 11 (DX11) in September of 2009. Nvidia didn't manage to ship its first DX11 card (the $500 GeForce GTX 480) until March of 2010. But the company is doing a valiant job of playing catch-up, beginning with the GTX 480 and the $350 GeForce GTX 470, followed by the less-costly (though still decidedly not budget-model) GeForce GTX 465 and GTX 460.

With the GeForce GTS 450, Nvidia brings its next-generation architecture, known as Fermi, down to a mainstream-card price point. This 1.3-billion-transistor video card starts at just $129, but it sports the same full suite of DX11 features found on the company’s high-end GTX 400-series cards. Despite the low price, it turns out to be an excellent performer at the resolutions budget-sensitive gamers typically run their games: 1,680x1,050 pixels or lower. And with drivers that boast additional HD-video and audio features not found in earlier Nvidia releases, this turns out to be an excellent card for video playback, as well.

Despite this card’s smaller size, you’ll still need two free expansion slot bays thanks to the cooler, as well as a six-pin power connector.

Though it’s more compact than the GeForce GTX 400 cards, the PCI Express-based GTS 450 still uses a cooler that blocks an adjacent PCI card slot. The large fan on the cooler is whisper-quiet, however, even when the card is running graphics-intensive programs. The card requires a single six-pin PCI Express power connector (versus the two connectors that the GeForce GTX 460 demands), and Nvidia suggests a 400-watt power supply for this card, which has a thermal design power rating of 106 watts. Our direct-from-Nvidia reference card sported a pair of dual-link DVI ports, as well as a mini-HDMI connector. Other manufacturers, though, may include different ports on their versions of this card, such as DisplayPort connectors, so be sure a given card has the ports you need before you buy.

Unlike AMD’s Eyefinity-equipped Radeon cards, which can drive three monitors off a single display, the GTS 450 can drive only two displays at once. You’ll need a second card to drive a third monitor using Nvidia's 3D Surround technology.

For those enthused by the technical details, the GTS 450 card includes 1GB of GDDR5 memory, running on a 128-bit memory interface at 3,600MHz. The card's graphics-processing chip runs at 783MHz and is based on the same Streaming Multiprocessor design as the GTX 460, but with 192 CUDA cores and 32 texture units, as opposed to the 336 CUDA cores and 56 texture units on the GTX 460. What this boils down to, as you’d expect, is lesser performance, but also a smaller, less expensive card. And feature-wise, the GTS 450 is identical to its costlier cousins, supporting the full suite of DirectX 11 commands, as well as Nvidia’s CUDA GPU processing and PhysX physics libraries. (More on why these matter later.) The card also works with Nvidia’s GeForce 3D Vision 3D-glasses kit.

Along with the release of the GTS 450 come Nvidia’s new R260 drivers, bringing not only compatibility with the new card, but also performance and feature improvements across all the 400-series cards. Along with speed improvements on earlier cards, the drivers add support for Blu-ray 3D (appropriate third-party playback software and a 3D-compatible HDTV with an HDMI 1.4 interface are required), lossless DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD audio, and a new installer than can wipe clean all traces of previous drivers. (Bits of previous drivers that aren't properly removed before installing newer versions often lead to performance problems, so this is a very welcome feature.)

The GTS 450, of course, lacks some of the horsepower of Nvidia’s more expensive cards, but the company is aiming it squarely at mainstream users who use 22-inch or smaller monitors, running at 1,680x1,050 or lower resolutions. And in our tests, while scores weren’t impressive at the highest resolutions, the board performed admirably at Nvidia’s target resolution, maintaining playable frame rates even with game details maxed out. When comparing performance, we looked at numbers for both AMD’s Radeon HD 5750, which is the most comparable card from a suggested-retail-price standpoint, as well as the HD 5770, which can be found discounted online in the same general price range as the GTS 450.

For instance, in our demanding DirectX 10 (DX10) third-person-shooter benchmark test, using the game Just Cause 2, the GeForce GTS 450 scored 27.8 frames per second (fps) at 1,680x1,050 resolution. That’s only a couple of frames slower than the 30.4fps scored by the AMD Radeon HD 5770 and the 30fps scored by the significantly more expensive GeForce GTX 460. Once you boost the resolution to 1,920x1,200, though, the GTS 450 falls significantly behind, scoring 20.5fps, against 30fps for the HD 5770 and 29.9fps for the GTX 460. (Note that the tests on the Radeon cards and the GTX 460 models were run when the cards were released, several months earlier than the GTS 450, and driver improvements have likely boosted their performance a bit.)

In our DX10 real-time-strategy game benchmark test, using the title World in Conflict, the GTS 450 scored 44fps at 1,280x1,024 and 29fps at 1,920x1,080, against 42fps and 32fps, respectively, for the HD 5770, and 37fps and 30fps for the HD 5750, AMD’s most direct price competitor.

The GTS 450 returned particularly impressive numbers on our Far Cry 2 DX10 test, achieving 63.8fps at 1,680x1,050 and 52.4fps at 1,920x1,200. It was even playable at 2,560x1,600, where it managed 33.7fps. The Radeon HD 5750, by comparison, scored 49fps at 1,680x1,050, 43.2fps at 1,920x1,200, and 28.7fps at 2,560x1,600. Even the HD 5770’s numbers were slightly lower, at 56.8fps, 49.8fps, and 33.3fps, respectively.

In our synthetic gaming benchmarks, the GTS 450 scored 10,627 on 3DMark Vantage’s Performance setting, and 4,428 on the test's Extreme settings. That compares very favorably with the 9,888 Performance and 4,272 Extreme scores achieved by the HD 5770. And on our ultra-demanding DX11 benchmark test, using Unigine's Heaven 2.0, the GTS 450 managed 19.8fps at 1,680x1,050, 16.6fps at 1,920x1,200, and 10.7fps at 2,560x1,600. The HD 5770 managed very similar DX11 performance (18.3fps, 16fps, and 10.5fps, respectively). This test is designed to tax ultra-high-end graphics cards (such as the $600 Radeon HD 5970), so don't let the low frame rates here fool you into thinking all DX11 games will run this poorly on cards in this price range.

One thing to keep in mind is that Nvidia’s recent cards have been highly overclockable, and you can likely get a significant performance boost by dialing up the GPU’s clock speed, or by buying a factory-overclocked version of this card with a cooler designed to handle extra heat.

The card is much more small-case-friendly than more powerful, costlier options that often approach a foot in length.

Though gaming performance on this card is at its best at resolutions of 1,680x1,050 and lower, in our Blu-ray playback tests, 1080p HD video (a.k.a. 1,920x1,080) played back smoothly, with excellent audio quality over the card’s mini-HDMI connector. The same can also be said for AMD's comparable cards.

Comparing the GTS 450 to AMD’s similarly priced offerings, the GTS 450 has a slight speed advantage (though it's really negligible in many tests). But the card is in the same performance ballpark as the slightly pricier Radeon HD 5770 if it's used on smaller monitors. The biggest differentiator between the Nvidia and AMD products in this price class isn’t really performance, but rather features such as multimonitor support and 3D gaming. The GTS 450 has the advantage of compatibility with Nvidia’s superb 3D Vision 3D-glasses setup, as well as support for CUDA GPU-accelerated processing (used in apps like Photoshop and Nero) and PhysX (which can boost eye candy in some games). On the other hand, AMD’s biggest advantage is its Eyefinity support, which allows it to drive three monitors using a single card. Opting for Nvidia would mean you'd need to buy two cards (and a costlier SLI-capable motherboard) to drive three screens, if that was your plan.

Given that the GTS 450 is coming to market about a year after AMD’s low-end DX11 entries, it's not really surprising that it does well against its older competition. And if history is any indicator, AMD may well lower the prices of its HD 5750 and HD 5770 cards to keep pace with Nvidia in short order. So, if you're looking for a gaming card in this price range, the one you should choose really comes down to whether you plan on running more than two monitors, are considering opting in to Nvidia's 3D Vision, or if your favorite games support PhysX. If none of those features sounds particularly enticing, and gaming on a single screen at resolutions of 1,680x1,050 or below is what you do, we'd just go with whatever option is the least costly when you're ready to buy.

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